StyleMeltdown the Design Portfolio of Alex Hackbart

Yep, I found a display error on Apple’s website. To me this is kinda like finding a four-leaf clover or a fossil in my backyard. Probably a lot less exciting than the two but hell, it doesn’t happen very often. Besides the error at the top from Knowmore.org,  they hardly ever mess up… right? Eh… Who am I to judge? Here’s another little gem from their Knowmore entry:

“According to Greenpeace, Apple products made with toxic chemicals (such as flame retardants and polyvinyl chloride) are being sold worldwide. When discarded, they typically end up in the hands of children in China, India and other developing countries. They dismantle the products for parts and are exposed to dangerous toxins that threatens their health and the environment. Take action now to get Apple to go green.”
[source]

But that was a long time ago, right? No more kids dying, right? I wish I had someone to clarify what is happening nowadays, research isn’t gonna be done by myself. Either way, fix your stupid display issue, you’re freaking Apple (insert better cuss words here).

Click for a bigger image.

In the days of MP3′s and people stealing more music than buying it, there comes a need to create a strategy to provoke fans to BUY the album, not steal it online. Some people try to add bonus tracks for download in the CD casing, some offer discount cards, some send free stickers and posters to hopefully get the fan excited enough to buy the album.

Enter: P.O.S.

Influenced just as much by Mos Def as he is punk bands like Minor Threat, he fuses his styles seamlessly to produce a unique sound that may put a smile on your face, or may make you want to punch yourself in the face. In order to keep up with the downloaders he released a new album with unique artwork. There are solid slides and 6 transparent slides in the booklet so the fan can rearrange the booklet and create unique artwork for themselves. Pretty cool. Here is a video of the booklet being rearranged.

And here is a link to his first single “Goodbye”

Do you think the artwork will boost sales?

I have been working on getting the new theme implemented on UFC Results for the past week or so and I think it is finally done. I haven’t had to build a theme in a while since I have been mostly doing work on our internal sites but it was good to get back into some coding. We wanted to have it up before UFC 93 on the 17th so it was time to get busy. Working with WP 2.7 was great, I’m loving the threaded comments. I also found a way to make custom gravatars work again by updating it into the functions.php file.

SUCCESS IS MINE!

I have been working to get a site to rank for california contractor general liability insurance in my free time as well, not as easy as it sounds. Insurance is crazy hard to rank for these days.

One thing I don’t think I’ll ever understand is the UFC 93 betting lines, I guess you can say I’m not a better myself. Unless of course it’s at the horse races and I can make $2 bets, ooohhhh boy, big money big money!

And for any of those who care last month I got my blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. YAY.

The UFC Results website has had the same design for over a year now and I think it’s time for a change. There are tons of events coming up on the calendar to get excited about. The UFC 92 fight card is stacked full of good fights that are sure to entertain. Since we are doing some SEO to better rank for UFC 92 we are ready to also create a new theme that has designated places for revenue generating elements. There are a lot of ways to do it but we have to figure out a way to make it not annoying like so many of the other ads are.

Also things are going great at Lightpost Creative, we are getting very busy for the upcoming year. We recently upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and it is awesome. At first I was lost and wasn’t sure about the whole layout change, but now I like it. I also like the built in plugin search that it has, it makes things a lot easier when installing plugins since it can download, unzip and install for you with just a click of a button.

When I am browsing the web I find it hard to keep all the good things I find organized. I’ve got del.icio.us, Youtube, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Flickr accounts. Whenever I want to go back to a site I found, I would have to get to search for it on the particular site that I marked it on. When I heard about a site called Second Brain I had to check it out. What it does is aggregate all of your Stumbles, Diggs, Youtube favorites etc. so you don’t have to comb through your accounts to find content you saved. In this article I will give you an overview of my user experience with Second Brain.

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